Developing a new website for your law firm can be a very important task towards the overall health of your advertising strategy. As a result, it is necessary to take into account many different factors that go into determining when you actually need a new website or need to refresh your current website. In this article, we’ll go over the different scenarios on when it is a good time to refresh your online digital assets.
Adding A New Practice Specialty or Service
If you are currently specialized in one area of the law but are looking into adding another specialty, then this is a great time to revamp or develop a completely new website. For example, if you are specialized in DUI law but are now moving into other areas of motor vehicle law like legal matters related to vehicle registration, it would be a great time to get a new website. It is important to do this as you will want to begin advertising the new services as soon as possible and the best place to start doing that is on your own website. This will lead to a change in your content creation that involves the new services so the Google algorithm can begin factoring in your content when people search for the new practice specialty you are offering.
Adding New Staff Members
It is a good idea to revamp your website whenever you add new lawyers, consultants or paralegals to your team. This information is quite useful and will again be helpful on the Google search algorithm side of things. If you are a relatively small team, adding additional menus that point to your new employee’s biography and qualifications can help diversify the look of your website. But don’t go overboard with changing the menu and making it too complicated as that can take away from the website visitor’s experience. Remember to consult with your website developer before making big changes that can affect the feel and flow of the website.
You Are Changing Your Overall Digital Strategy
Say you have been using your current website for the past few years but have not seen an overall increase in business. It might then be a time to go into your website’s back end and try to figure out what is actually going on. You might notice that your website traffic as a result of search has not varied much during the past few years. Sure there might be dips and spikes according to trends but they are leveling out and not netting you much new business. As a result, it will be important to find out the assets that are actually funneling back to your business. Doing a social media audit could cause you to realize that you are not getting much traction as a result of your posts while SEO and SEM audits could lead to a discovery in major problems in how your website is being presented to the search algorithm. These two aspects of your digital presence are extremely important to how new clients are funneled into you and if you haven’t updated in years, this will have a major effect on your performance.
You Have Not Updated Your Website In Several Years
An old website that you haven’t touched or worked on in as little as three years can be considered defunct to search engines as well as social media platforms. This is the case because algorithms are constantly updated based on what the general user is typically searching for. This is why you need a website design agency that keeps their finger on the pulse of SEO and SEM changes that might have an effect on your ability to obtain clients from Google search. The Google search blog is constantly updating with best practices that web designers can use to make sure their websites are up to date according to their search needs. It is one thing to have a website but quite another thing to make sure that there is a constant stream of traffic that knows what you are doing and is informed of any changes you have in your practice.
You are Changing Your Geographic Location
This is an extremely important note for legal practices that depend on community engagement to funnel in new clients. Community engagement deals with local online searches with phrases and keywords that individuals in your town or region are using in order to find the services that match their needs. If you are changing where your current location is, you will also need to include that on all parts of your website so that the search engines can pick up this information. Failing to do this can result in clients that are misled into thinking that you are in one location when you are really in another. You will also want to make these changes for any of your other digital assets like social media pages as they also play a role in determining what individuals searching for specific keywords get in the search results. Additionally, you will also want to have additional pages that showcase updates to your current practices if they are important. For example, if you are specifically using social distancing as a way to combat the current pandemic situations, it will be a good idea to include that information in your website material. This will have the added bonus of showing up in the search results for people that are looking for legal practices that are also cognizant of the current situation and are doing everything they can to keep their clients safe.
As you can see, there are several scenarios where you would want to make changes to your current website or develop a completely new one. Adding new practice services and specialties as well as updating sites that are a few years old can make a huge difference in generating new business. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. For more information or to schedule a consultation with us, feel free to reach out to us at 1-888-683-3212.